Footfalls" Shahla Simin and Reihane Karbasi English Department, University of Isfahan

Home , Footfalls, Not I, Play (play), That Time, Watt (novel)

24158 Shahla Simin and Reihane Karbasi/ Elixir Literature 70 (2014) 24158-24160

Available online at www.elixirpublishers.com (Elixir International Journal)

Literature

Elixir Literature 70 (2014) 24158-24160 Psychoanalytic Feminism in Samuel Barclay Beckett's Drama "Footfalls" Shahla Simin and Reihane Karbasi English Department, University of Isfahan. ARTICLE INFO ABSTRACT Article history: SamuelBarclay Beckett, born near Dublin, took a degree at Trinity College (Dublin's Received: 17 March 2014; Protestant University), but then went abroad and settled for good in Paris in 1937. He has Received in revised form: lived in Paris ever since (Abrams, 1962 ). He wrote Footfalls in 1975. During the 1960s, 25 April 2014; 1970s, and 1980s, no one's critical theory of writing dominated feminist criticism because Accepted: 9 May 2014; feminist theory and criticism highlighted the personal allowing for diverse theories and approaches to textual analysis. According to Showalter, American feminism at that time Keywords was essentially textual; stressing repression, British feminism was essentially Marxist, Feminism, stressing oppression; and French feminism was essentially psychoanalytic ; stressing Psychoanalytic Feminism, repression.(Bressler, 2007) By taking a biographical approach and analysing his French Feminism, mysterious "Footfalls", the main aim of this study is to provide well supported reasons that Drama. Beckett is a real psychoanalyst in Feminism. © 2014 Elixir All rights reserved

Introduction actions that we can see in this play as just going back and forth. Samuel Barclay Beckett is the 20 th century novelist and Except for the place May walks, the whole stage is in dark. The dramatistborn near Dublin, took a degree at Trinity College stage is the mind of a woman; a vague place in which she just go (Dublin's protestant university), but then went abroad and settled back and forth. In each part, the light will be somewhat darker for good in Paris in 1937. He has lived in Paris ever since, than in the preceding one. Therefore it is darkest when the strip teaching in France lycees , and serving occasionally as Joyce's is lit up without May at the very end. Correspondingly, the bell secretary, translator and critical defender-but mostly writing. gets slightly softer each time. Beckett introduced a "Dim spot on (Abrams, 1962) During the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, no one face during halts at R [right] and L [left]" so that May's face critical theory of writing dominated feminist theory and would be visible during her monologues (Ackerley and criticism highlighted the personal, allowing the diverse theories Gontarski, 2006). Everything going to slow down, the sound of and approaches to textual analysis. Historically, geography the bell, the light, and the movements. The May's face is lite up played a significant role in determining the major interests of the when she speaks, when she pauses at right and left part of the various voices of feminist criticisms, with three somewhat stage. Beckett wanted to show in this part that a woman is alive distinct geographical strains of feminism emerging: American, when she speaks. British and French. These geographical divisions no longer Analysis of the Drama serve as distinct theoretical or practical boundaries, but they Beckett puts the emphasis on the sound of the May's foot, remain important historical remarks in feminism's development. the sound of a walking which leads nowhere, a walking in the (Bressler, 2007). form of a seeking which has no result. The play has a very Beckett's move to French was a turning point in his writing. musical structure and timing is critical. “The walking should be At first, he was busy writing novels, but in 1952 he started like a metronome”, Beckett instructed, “One length must be writing drama with his first masterpiece "waiting for Godot". measured in exactly nine seconds” (Asmus, 1977). . “These ‘life- He even was the director of his plays. In 1975 he wrote long stretches of walking,’ he told his German May, Hildegard "Footfalls", a time which was the start of female phase; female Schmahl, are ‘the center of the play; everything else is phase is dated from 1970 to the present.(Bressler, 2007) It is secondary’”(Asmus, 1977). impossible that the last modernist, Samuel Beckett remained To ensure that every step could be heard “sandpaper was untouched with attitudes in that time. attached to the soles of [Billie] Whitelaw’s soft ballet General Background: slippers”(Knowlson, 1996) during the London premiere. Here is "Footfalls " is a play by Samuel Beckett. It was written in just a present person. Is she in fact a present person? Beckett English, between 2 March and December 1975 and was first said to Billie Whitelaw during rehearsals for Footfalls1“Let’s performed at the Royal Court Theatre as part of the Samuel just say you’re not all there.” We should consider the whole Beckett Festival, on May 20, 1976 directed by Beckett himself. stage as not all there. It seems as if that the stage is a mind Billie Whitelaw, played May whilst Rose Hill voiced the suffering from a loss,Loss of a defined and definite being. mother. The matter of fact here is being lonely not alone. May is The play is in four parts. Each opens with the sound of a lonely, abandoned with her lack of a true identity. We should bell . After this the lights fade up to reveal an illuminated strip consider that "a goal of feminism is to change this view of along which a woman, May, paces back and forth, nine steps woman so that each woman will realize that she is a valuable within a one meter stretch. In Beckett's attitude a woman is person possessing the same privilegesand rights as men. As May allowed to and able to walk or better say, act in a limited space. covers the nine paces (seven in earlier printed texts) she hugs The woman as portrayed in this play is just doing repeated herself, the arms crossed, with the hands clasping the shoulders

in front. ‘When you walk, you slump together, when you speak, girl do not go out of the house. The mother’s voice addresses the you straighten up a bit.’ Schmahl asked Beckett if May’s posture audience directly. She tells us that she too is watching her was supposed to express fear? “No, not fear. It expresses that daughter along with us literally through the corridor wall. We May is there exclusively for herself. She is isolated” (Asmus, learn that the turning point in May’s life, the “it” happened in 1977). girlhood: “when other girls her age were out at … lacrosse” Jacques Lacan posits that the human psyche consists of (Beckett,1998) she had already begun her obsessive pacing. three parts, or what he calls orders: the imaginary, the symbolic, From that time on significantly she has not ventured outside. and the real. Each of these orders interacts with the The only thing that shows the presence and signifies their other(Bressler, 2007). It seems as if that May is stocked in the being is the sound of the woman's footfall.May wanted to be first and did not have any space to grow to the next parts. recognized at least by her footfalls. In the beginning the hall had One of a long line of Beckett protagonists whose name been carpeted but May had asked her mother to have it taken up. begins with an M, May is a woman in her forties (who should When questioned the child had said because she needed to “hear however appear “ageless” (Asmus, 1977).She paces back and the feet, however faint they fall”; “the “motion alone is not forth on a strip of bare landing outside her dying – if not already enough”. (Beckett, 1998) The apparition in the story in Part III dead – mother’s room (a vertical ray of light not in the printed on the other hand makes “No sound. [Pause] None at least to be text suggests a door barely ajar). The door behind the stage heard” (Beckett, 1998). which is half open signifies the fact that we entered the mind of In an earlier draft, the voice tells the audience: “My voice is May. in her mind” (Mercier, 1990) suggestive of the fact that the The appearance of May is really pitiful. She has a worn out mother actually is only a figment of May’s imaginings. This is dressing-gown. As if she had been buried by her dress one time borne out by the fact that voice tells the story of a girl who before.The woman, clearly a shadow of her former self, wears “called her mother” (Beckett, 1998),” instead of simply talking tattered nightwear and has a ghostly pallor. Beckett said: “One about a girl who “called me .” This is the kind of slip May might could go very far towards making the costume quite unrealistic, make if she was narrating the mother’s part herself. unreal. It could, however, also be an old dressing-gown; worked The pitiful situation of the girl and her busy mind donot like a cobweb … It is the costume of a ghost” (Asmus, 1977) even let her to sleep. May sleeps “in snatches” with her head .As May paces back and forth on the stage, she hugs herself that bowed against the wall which is reminiscent of Mary in Watt . apparently shows how lonely she is.“You feel cold. The whole (Beckett, 1998). “Beckett explains [why] the mother interrupts time, in the way you hold your body too. Everything is frost and herself in the sentence ‘In the old home, the same where she — night” (Asmus, 1977). The adjective ‘ghostly’ is used frequently (pause)’ and then continues ‘The same where she began. She – by Beckett himself and others – to describe various aspects of was going to say: ... the same where she was born. But that is Footfalls . wrong, she hasn’t been born. She just began. It began. A life, May’s mother is only ever heard. We learn that she is which didn’t begin as a life, but which was just there, as a apparently ninety years old and in poor health. The more likely thing”(Asmus, 1977). truth is that she is a creation of May’s mind, especially when In the second part the mother speaks of the daughter, in the one examines Beckett’s earlier drafts. third part, the daughter of the mother, in a way that is exactly As it was mentioned before the play is made up of four parallel. ‘One must sense the similarities of both narratives,’ parts. In the first part there is a conversation carried by the explained Beckett, ‘Not so much from the text as from the style, mother and May. May and her mother are two women who from the way that the text is spoken’ (Asmus, 1977). share their grief and their pitiful situations. Beckett by writing In a manner similar to Mouth in Not I , “the shift into third these pitiful conversations and situations arouse the audience's person narrative and the indefinite pronoun work both to sense of sympathy. The audience for sure understand that May objectify the text, making it into a separate entity that seems have lost something. She has lost her identity. May and her disconnected from personal history. In that sense the recitation mother go through the daily routine by rote. Both voices are low becomes a verbal structure repeated in consciousness rather than and slow throughout. May asks her mother if she requires a sequence of memories in spontaneous association.” (Lyons, tending in any way. To each request the mother says: “Yes, but 1983)This part can be subdivided into four fragments. it is too soon.” (Beckett, 1984)This sentence is a paradoxical After each part May stops for a time and then starts pacing answer, given to May by her mother. The mother is an old again. There are three parts in the play which are when May woman who needs her girl to nurses her. says "Sequel". In this part which is the most important evidence May ask her mother what age she is. She’s told that she is in that May as a woman is searching to find her as a self. This part her “forties” but only after May has first let her mother know opens with May uttering the word, “Sequel” twice, which that she is ninety. The mother asks May: “Will you never have Beckett asked to be pronounced as “Seek well” –pun – since she done … revolving it all … In your poor mind?” (Beckett, 1984) is seeking for herself(Asmus, 1977). The pacing back and forth is an externalization of this inner May begins to tell a story in which an undefined ‘she’, unresolved issue. “It All” was a title Beckett was considering probably herself, has taken to haunting the local Anglican before he opted for Footfalls though we never discover what “it” church, which she enters through a locked door; there ‘she’ might be. May may or may not be a ghost but she is walks ‘up and down, up and down, his poor arm’” (Mercier, undoubtedly a haunted individual. 1990) “Literally she is walking along the ‘arms’ of a cross- “M (May) and V (Voice) create a dialogue which is shaped church” (Brienza, 1987). simultaneously time present and time past, for, although the Amy and Mrs. Winter come to the play not physically, but mother’s voice is an echo from the past, May is speaking to her in this part May starts to make up a story about a girl, named in the endless present dramatized before our eyes. Quite literally Amy (an anagram of May) and her mother, named Mrs. Winter. in Footfalls , the past is in the present” (Brater, 1977). Simply Although Beckett knew a Mrs. Winter in real life the name put: they are ‘living’ in the past. would have been chosen to reflect the coldness of “his own In the second part the mother start talking to the audiences ‘winter’s tale’, just as he changed the ‘south door’ of the church directly. She talks about her girl. She tell the audiences that her 24160 Shahla Simin and Reihane Karbasi/ Elixir Literature 70 (2014) 24158-24160

in the manuscript to the ‘north door’ at a late stage for the same [G]hosts … are traditionally tied to places, condemned for a reason” (Knowlson, 1996). certain time to walk the earth (Connor, 2006). In this part May wants to make up a story in which she The aim of the play is to show how a woman is getting wants to make another girl out of herself, but again the new May lower and lower and not be identified as self but as a thing or (Amy)becomes exactly the same as May in the previous better say nothing. In an interview with Jonathan Kalb, Billie parts.The name Amy is another pun: “A me.”This means a new Whitelaw describes May’s journey: “In Footfalls … [May] gets "me". lower and lower and lower until it’s like a little pile of ashes on Mrs. Winter has become aware of something strange “at the floor at the end, and the light comes up and she’s Evensong” and questions her daughter about it while at supper. gone”(Kalb, 1989). She asks if Amy had seen anything strange during the service Both of character and the sound of the mother are haunting but the daughter insists she did not because she “was not there” ghosts. It seems as if that both ghosts have suffered terrible a point her mother takes issue with because she is convinced that lives.they sympathize with each other. the James Knowlson and she heard her distinctly say “Amen.” (Beckett, 1984) This is not John Pilling in Frescoes of the Skull (p.227) come close to a dramatization of the event that traumatized May however as summarizing the entire play in a single sentence: “We realize, that happened in girlhood and Amy is described in the text as perhaps only after the play has ended, that we may have been “scarcely a girl anymore.” (Beckett, 1984) watching a ghost telling a tale of a ghost (herself), who fails to “‘The daughter only knows the voice of the mother’. One be observed by someone else (her fictional alter ego ) because can recognize the similarity between the two from the sentences she in turn is not really there … even the mother’s voice may in their narratives, from the expression. The strange voice of the simply be a voice in the mind of a ghost.” daughter comes from the mother. The ‘Not enough?’ in the Conclusion: mother’s story must sound just like the ‘Not there?’ of Mrs. W All of these instances from "Footfalls" attest to Beckett's in Amy’s story, for example. These parallelisms are extremely psychoanalytic Feminism, also exhibited in his more well- important for the understanding of the play … One can suppose known works. The play reflects the after-effects of his living in that she has written down everything which she has invented up a society of psychoanalytic feminism attitudes, and, therefore, to this, that she will one day find a reader for her story— can be read as a key for better understanding his tendency to therefore the address to the reader …‘Words are as food for this show the woman's mind suffrages as a result of being poor girl.’ Beckett says. ‘They are her best friends.’ … Above disregarded in the society. all, it is important that the narrative shouldn’t be too flowing and References matter-of-course. It shouldn’t give the impression of something Abrams, M. H. (1962). Norton anthology of English literature, already written down. May is inventing her story while she is volume 2, page 2542 speaking. She is creating and seeing it all gradually before her. It Ackerley, C. J. and Gontarski, S. E.(2006). The Faber is an invention from beginning to end. The picture emerges Companion to Samuel Beckett , (London: Faber and Faber, p 202 gradually with hesitation, uncertainty – details are always being Asmus, W. D. (1997).Practical aspects of theatre, radio and added” (Asmus, 1977). television, Rehearsal notes for the German premiere of Beckett’s Everything is dead but everything going to die again. From That Time and Footfalls at the Schiller-Theater Werkstatt, part to part the light becomes slowly and continuously darker, Berlin, (1.9.76) Journalof Beckett Studies , No 2. the tone becomes slower and lower, so the walking accompanied Asmus, W. D. (1977). ‘Practical Aspects of Theater, Radio and by small hesitation. When she begins to walk, there’s a small Television: Rehearsal Notes,’ trans. Helen Watanabe in Journal hesitation, as though she were unsure if she should walk or not. of Beckett Studies 2, p 85 “Beckett pointed out that on her last walk along the strip of Brater, E.(1977).‘Fragment and Beckett’s form in That Time and light, her energy runs out after three paces and she has to wait Footfalls ’ in Journal of Beckett Studies , No 2. there until enough vitality returns to drag herself to the end of Beckett, S. (1984) .Collected Shorter Plays of Samuel Beckett the light.” (Conversation with Samuel Beckett, 2006). (London: Faber and Faber), p 163-243 “As the play ends, Mrs. Winter speaks to Amy the very Beckett, S. (1998). Watt (London: John Calder [1953]), p 53 words spoken to May by her mother: ‘Will you never have done Brienza, S. D. (1987).‘Perilous Journey’s on Beckett’s Stages’ … revolving it all?’” (Mercier, 1990) Up until this point May in Burkman, K. H., (Ed.) Myth and Ritual in the Plays of Samuel has identified who has been speaking, At the end, when ‘Mrs. Beckett (London and Toronto: Fairleigh Dickinson University W’ says, “Amy” it is May who answers, “Yes, Mother” – Press), p 33 significantly she does not say, “Amy: Yes, Mother.” Charles E. Bressler. (2007). Literary Criticism: An Introduction Can May be the ghost and be ‘Amy’? Yes, if each reflects a to Theory and Practice. Houghton Colge, pp. 177, 179, 342 different aspect of whom she is. In the final section the stage is Connor, S. (2006). “Beckett and the World”, A lecture given at empty and the only thing to be heard is the sound of the bell. the the Global Beckett conference, Odense lights come up and then fade out. Conversation with Samuel Beckett, Paris, March 1980.( 2006) “The final ten seconds with ‘No trace of May’, is a crucial Quoted in Pountney, R.,‘Stringent Demands: Aspects of Beckett reminder that May was always ‘not there’ or only there as a in Performance’ in Murray, C., (Ed.) Samuel Beckett – 100 ‘trace’”. “May, like the Amy of her story, is simply ‘not there.’ Years (Dublin: New Island), p 74 ‘Strange or otherwise,’ we hear nothing, we see nothing. Kalb, J. (1989). Beckett in Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge Absence is the only presence” (Brater, 1977). As Beckett told University Press), p 240 Billie Whitelaw, when she asked him if May was dead, he Knowlson, J. (1996). Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel replied, “Let’s just say you’re not all there.” (Kalb, 1989) This Beckett (London: Bloomsbury), p 615, 624 has been interpreted that May don’t consider herself to exist; she Lyons, C. R. (1983).Samuel Beckett , MacMillan Modern is not being regarded when she was alive. But it should be Dramatists (London: MacMillan Education), p 168 remembered that [a] ghost has a curious relation to finitude, Mercier, V. (1990).Beckett/Beckett (London: Souvenir Press), p which means it is never entirely unearthly or out of this world. 233